In the first minutes of the T-rated Infamous, players will hear the curse commonly associated with manure and stepping in it. A new report examines how much profanity makes it into T-rated games.

A few weeks ago, I e-mailed John Davison, a games journalism friend, who runs the parental-guide video game site WhatTheyPlay.com. I'd been playing Infamous and was surprised by the amount of cursing in it. The game is rated T, a rating category I previously thought was safe to purchase for teenage relatives whose parents are unlikely to want them to hear cursing in their entertainment.

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Sure, "shit" is a word you can hear in PG-13 movies, but given its absence from network TV I had incorrectly assumed it wasn't in T-rated games.

Davison said he was working on a story about profanity in Teen games and published the results this week.

What Davison found:

If you're sensitive to profanity, and to words like "s**t" specifically, then Teen-rated games are not going to be safe territory. While you won't ever hear "f**k" (or any variations of it) in a Teen game, unless it's bleeped-out as it is in UFC Undisputed, you will hear plenty of words like "a**," "b*tch," "p**s," "d**n," body part terms like "d**k," and "t*ts", and variations on cuss words that include "hell" or references to god.

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Check out the rest of the What They Play article for comments from the Entertainment Software Ratings Board which labels such content. This one isn't so much a question of labeling, as it is of what kind of content warrants what kind of rating.